[John Williams]

Hi there, rather than using the Turbulent Displacement effect, which is usually good but doesn’t give you the looping options you are after, you can use a Fractal Noise effect & animate the Evolution value. In the ‘Evolution options’ you can set this to ‘Cycle evolutions’.
I’d recommend creating this in a solid layer.

Then create your text and add a ‘Displacement Map’ effect to it and use your solid layer as a ‘Map Layer.’ (make sure you set it to Effects & Masks otherwise it will look at the layer prior to the effect you have added.) This will displace your text in a loop.

Now if you only want part of your text to be displaced then create a mask on the solid layer and add some feather to it. Only the area with the mask will be displaced and the area outside of the mask will remain un affected.

If you need more info I have a project file I can send you with this set up.

Hope this helps;)

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

Hi there, this is possible in After Effects without any plug-ins needed.

I can either give you a step by step guide how to do it or send you a project file with the tunnel effect created that you can deconstruct and reuse as you wish.

Please just let me know;)

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

Hi there, from what you describe it sounds like you need a simple expression.

Firstly, as you wish to have an ‘instance’ of your dot, you will be best off creating the dot then PreComposing it, the duplicating the Precomposed dot.

Next if you go to the position properties you can add a wiggle expression. If you go for something like: wiggle(0,500)

Then because the first value is zero it won’t animated over time, it will just be a static wiggle, but with the second value at 500 is will randomly position the layer up to a maximum of 500 pixels on the X, Y, Z. Every time you duplicate the layer you will notice each layer will be positioned randomly as the ‘random seed’ for each layer is different distributing your layers randomly around your comp.

You can go deeper with this using variables but this should get you started.

Hope that helps;)

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

Hi there, sorry for late reply. If you still need help please send me your project file and I can take a look and give you a solution as it’s hard to advise otherwise.

Best

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

Hi there, it’s hard to see from the images of your After Effects interface exactly what’s going on, but from what you are describing, the problem sounds like you are using the Screen Mode which increases the transparency of pixels depending how dark they are. With the Bevel Alpha Effect, what you are describing is what I would expect. However with the Bevel Alpha Layer Style, that shouldn’t take the layers blending mode into consideration. Therefore you will need to check the Layer style settings ‘Highlight Mode’ and ‘Shadow Mode.’
If that’s not fixing it then it could be to do with the fact that you seem to be using a much older version of After Effects.

Be interested to find out either way!

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

Hi there, I think I understand what you are going for.

You could try selecting the darker parts of the artwork using Select / Color Range.
Copy the selection to a new layer and then play around with the settings of the Emboss Layer Style.

Once you have something that looks like its adding some depth to the figure then place it on your wooden background image toggle through the blending modes (Shift +) to find the best method, which may be overlay or something else.

Hope that gives some extra options without needing to get into 3D software which would of course add a lot more reality.

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

Hi there, if you would be happy to send the project, I could take a look and see if I can identify the problem

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

I tried to have a look but the link seems broken:(

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

Hi there. I’d certainly agree with Chaz. This is almost definitely best done in Cinema 4D but unfortunately the Lite version that comes with After Effects won’t give you the particles and gravity dynamics, however, the good news is you can just download the 14 day trial;)

There’s loads of tutorials how to get it going in that, Greyscale Gorilla is a top site for Cinema4D.

Hope that helps if you choose to go that route, it’s the future for motion graphics;)

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

That sounds like an interesting method.
Depending on the shot, you could also try tracking a point in the moving shot and then also using the speed expression to generate a value.

John Williams

Soho Editors